If that's not some funny shit, I don't know what is. Somebody please mod parent up. I'm ass-deep in that bottle of whiskey now, typing at about 20 words per minute trying hard not to make a typo. My wife has informed me that she would like some lovin', and I'm off to bed shortly. Goodnight, all, and Merry Christmas!

Sorry, I was expecting someone to have found a way of controlling the video card fan to belt out jingle bells, or some strange hum in the graphics system. This... Now this is stupid. I mean what next - someone doing the same thing with glasses of beer, or bells, or...
Give me my 30 seconds back

I heard a story while I was working at a drive system design/assembly firm about a fellow who, back in the early days of digital drive systems, took a tape recorder, hooked its output up to an analog input on the drive, and used the signal of his voice on the tape to modulate the torque command to the motor, thus resulting in the motor vibrating out the sound of his voice.

Of course, the better stories I heard while I was there involved runaway motors tumbling across the shop floor (they're supposed to be bolted to the floor) or rotors breaking off through the motor housing and lodging in the shop roof. Fortunately, a greater understanding of digital drive systems and better safety practices made the union grievance the only scary thing on the shop floor while I was there.

I heard a story while I was working at a drive system design/assembly firm about a fellow who, back in the early days of digital drive systems, took a tape recorder, hooked its output up to an analog input on the drive, and used the signal of his voice on the tape to modulate the torque command to the motor, thus resulting in the motor vibrating out the sound of his voice.

Back in the early days of the first TRS-80, my company Practical Applications, now out of business for many many years, issued a music program for the Radio Shack TRS-80. It relied on the non-shielding employed (or should that be the shielding not employed on that early personal computer, and we offered both a musical keyboard and also some available music.

Back in the early 80's I had a text-graphic (popularly but misleadingly known as "ASCII graphics") program for the IBM PC that played Silent Night. When the song was done, the grandfather clock's pendulum kept swinging, etc., and the clock's ticking was effected by toggling the cassette interface. Since almost no "compatibles" had cassette interfaces, I used this as an example of how they weren't 100% compatible.

You know, some older motherboards have these 'singing' coils - if you write a simple loop that changes the power draw of the CPU roughly 500-2000 times per second, you can make audible sound.I bet you can play Jingle Bells this way without having to take anything apart:)

Err, WTF who mods grammar nazism up? Granted I was being a counter-grammar-nazi but still... and I'm pretty sure you don't moderate things underrated unless they are actually downmodded. But oh well, what do I care free karma for me?

So then how 'bout the Slashdot users mod up the Engadget Guitar Hero controlled Christmas light article so it makes the front page? The YouTube link is here...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkyrcW24USI
In my opinion the work and ingenuity in this are a little lesser than 32 synchronized channels of Guitar Hero goodness.
Disclaimer:
My brother and I are the architects of the Guitar Hero (Frets on Fire) light display, so yes, I am self-promoting a bit. Thanks for your help!

Unique only in that this could possibly be the worst, most unsatisfying non-news i've ever seen on/. Title says it all. Hilarity ensues. In Soviet Russia, accordion plays geek. Yoda not present in memory tech of the week is. WTF is wrong with you people?

Back in 1982 or 1983, when I had a Dragon 32, which output its video and audio via a UHF modulator to a TV, I noticed that various on-screen black-and-white (especially) patterns would cause buzz to come through on the TV audio channel (through which the Dragon's deliberate sound output also appeared).
Some reader of a Dragon-oriented magazine also noticed this, and submitted a program to draw such patterns to the screen as to cause a "tune" to be heard via the mechanism of this "buzzing" interference betw